Review – SNK’s World Heroes

By: Kevin Chang

SNK Playmore has brought us another of their classic arcade games onto the PSN. World Heroes is now available for the PlayStation 3 system and for the PlayStation Portable. Not sure if this game still kicks butt as it did back in the 90’s? Warm-up and punch through the wooden walls towards our review.

The story of this game is that a scientist (Dr. Brown) has perfected a time machine and he has arranged for you to combat fighters throughout history, (many of the fighters are based on true historical figures). There are 8 characters to choose from, no names are available just their respected flags from country of origin. You might recognize a few fighters due ti their uncanny resemblances. One that’s really easy to spot is the fighter from China. He is shirtless and screams with every punch or kick and is lightning fast. Could it be Bruce Lee? There’s an American fighter who rips off his shirt and is a wrestler. Hulk Hogan anyone? Other fighters who you might recognizes from history class.

There are two modes in the game, Normal Mode which is the story, and Survival Mode which you go against all the fighters and if you lose its GAME OVER.

SNK was nice enough to include four different kind of difficulty settings. Easy is for those not familiar to fighting games and then rqamps up to the MVS difficulty, the cabinets setting for the masters who eat fighting games for breakfast. The difficulty settings are included in all of the NEOGEO collection games along with online. The controls feel responsive. To kick press the X button, for the punches press the Square button, and to grad and throw your opponent press the Triangle button. For the menu press the Select button and from there you can save and load manually, but the autosave feature is in the game. The character’s animations and graphics were improved a bit.

World Heroes clocks in with a 49 MB download size and a price tag of $7.19 for PlayStation Plus members, and for non-PlayStation Plus members it’s $8.99.

World Heroes could have gotten a better make-over, but we can’t have everything in life. Despite getting my rear handed to me in this game, I sure had fun playing with friends (offline of course). Minor frame drops and wall tearing is not enough to completely distract you from the gameplay, but still this game has not aged so well.